


Sleep Tight

by Ariel_Tempest



Series: A Long Time Coming [5]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Art Immitating Life, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family time, Fluff, Nightmares, Short Short, no nutritional value
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-27 03:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17758856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariel_Tempest/pseuds/Ariel_Tempest
Summary: You're never too old to have bad dreams.





	Sleep Tight

She wasn’t certain why she was awake. She certainly hadn’t been a moment ago, but something had jerked her eyes open in the darkness, straining to catch the sound of she wasn’t certain what. For a moment she almost convinced herself that Joseph had simply been snoring and let out a particularly loud snort, as he sometimes did. One of the first things she’d learned after giving her own room up to Lindsey was that her husband was not a particularly quiet sleeper, although she could generally manage to dream through it. The thought was dispelled, however, by a soft voice in the darkness.

“Phyllis? Are you awake?”

“Yes, although I’m not certain why,” she replied, rolling over and fumbling with the bedside lamp. It clicked on and the two of them sat blinking in the sudden light. She looked at the man lying next to her, as much for the sake of her eyes as anything, and suppressed a smile. Despite his receding hairline, sleep had still managed to tousle his hair and part of it was sticking up on the side. She thought it adorable.

“Me neither,” he admitted, frowning slightly. “I feel like there must have been a noise, but I don’t know what.” The two of them paused, automatically listening. “I don’t hear anyone in the house.”

“Perhaps it was an animal outside?”

“It would have been a very loud animal.” Joseph pondered a moment, then frowned, a sheepish sort of expression. “I don’t suppose I could have woken us both, could I?”

Phyllis thought about it and shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible,” she allowed, even though it had never happened before. He rarely woke her, and when he did, it was obvious. Now that she’d been awake for a few minutes, she was quite aware of that last cup of tea before bed. “Either way, I should get up for a little bit. I’ll be back.” Standing, she retrieved her dressing robe and eased the bedroom door open as quietly as possible so as not to wake Lindsey in the room across the hallway. As she turned toward the bathroom, however, she realized there was a faint glow coming from under the second bedroom’s door. While it was just believable that Joseph had woken the two of them, it would have taken a much louder sound to wake Lindsey. Curious, she tapped on the door. “Lindsey? Are you awake?”

The light immediately went out. All was silence. 

Phyllis frowned. For the most part, the past month had shown her younger cousin to be a well behaved boy. He was bright in his lessons, although he didn’t speak out much, and obedient when asked to do chores. There was no denying, however, that he was quite withdrawn and there were times where he seemed to almost hide inside himself. It worried her. Gently, she pushed the door open. “Lindsey, dear, I saw your light. Is everything all right?”

For a moment it seemed like the silence was going to continue. Instead, very softly, a voice replied from the darkness. “I’m sorry.”

These were the times Phyllis hated, the ones where something was clearly wrong, but she didn’t know what and rather than tell her, Lindsey would draw inside himself and just apologize. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, listening to the noise of shuffling slippers from the other room as Joseph got out of bed and came to join her. “Sorry for what?” she asked as gently as she could. “Turn on the light, dear. Please, let’s talk.”

There was a rustle of sheets and a soft click. At first the face of the boy in the bed was obscured by one pyjama clad arm. Then it drew back, revealing a pale face and dark eyes, watching warily from over the pile of the bed dressing. 

Crossing to the bed, Phyllis perched on the edge of the bed, reaching out to brush the fall of black hair off the boy’s forehead. She moved slowly, as if he might try to bite or run. She couldn’t help it. He was so much like a wild thing sometimes. “What are you sorry for?” she asked again, coaxing.

He dropped his eyes to the comforter. “I’m sorry I woke you. I was having a bad dream. I know I’m too old for them.”

“I don’t know that you’re ever too old for bad dreams,” Joseph answered from the doorway, expression politely baffled. Like Phyllis, he’d retrieved his bathrobe, although he also had his slippers. He moved further into the room, revealing that his hair had not been smoothed. “Whoever told you that you were?” 

Lindsey pulled further into the bedding and didn’t answer, but Phyllis could guess. It was possible, just possible, that it had been his grandmother or cousin Bertha, both harried and put upon without the time to be comforting. More likely it had been cousin Mable, who Phyllis hadn’t heard from in years, but who had written as soon as she learned that Lindsey had fallen to Phyllis’s care. Mable had always been too concerned with what the neighbors thought and from both the letter and what little she’d managed to coax from Lindsey, time and marriage hadn’t changed that. If anything, it seemed to have made it worse. “It doesn’t matter,” she assured the boy, patting his hand. At times like this it was difficult to remember he would be eleven in a few months. “Mr. Molesley is right. Even adults have frightening dreams now and again. Why don’t you tell us yours?”

After a moment of looking down at the sheets and grimacing, Lindsey replied, “Because it’s stupid. It shouldn’t have been frightening.”

A soft chuff of laughter came from Joseph, the sort of laugh he gave when he found a statement to be so inaccurate it was absurd. It was a kind laugh, but Phyllis always worried a bit when he used it around Lindsey, simply because the boy was so skittish. “That hardly means it wasn’t, does it?” he asked, coming over and sitting on the bed next to his wife. The height difference between them was a bit less when they sat, but he was still tall enough to look at the boy over Phyllis’s head. “Why, I remember when I was a boy I once had a bad dream that was nothing but blue sky and clouds.” Lindsey gave him a questioning little frown. “It’s true! I remember it vividly,” he insisted. “I don’t know if I was flying or on the ground or what. There was just blue, sunny sky and a few fluffy clouds and nothing was happening, but somehow I suddenly knew that something was about to and…and it was terrifying. So I woke up.” He looked between the two of them. Lindsey still looked a bit skeptical and even Phyllis couldn’t help but smile bemusedly at the thought of her husband being subconsciously scared by a summer day. Clearing his throat a bit sheepishly, he asked, “What was your worst nightmare, Phyllis? I mean, the one you remember most clearly.”

The question caught her off guard. On the one hand, she saw the sense in sharing their dreams, showing Lindsey that his own weren’t so absurd. On the other hand… “Well, mine was honestly pretty frightening. That is, it made sense that I was scared.”

“Go on then,” Joseph encouraged. He was smiling at her and she now had Lindsey’s attention, so she shrugged her shoulders and continued.

“It was night, but there were no stars. Just a black sky with a full moon. It wasn’t just a full moon, though. It was blood red. Then, with no warning, because there were no clouds or anything, a huge bolt of red lightning came down from the sky and set the entire world on fire.” She looked between them, smiling helplessly at the memory. “And then I woke up.”

“Golly.” Joseph’s smile had turned to a stunned look, as if he couldn’t believe his sweet, gentle wife would have such a terrible dream. “I shouldn’t wonder! That sounds dreadful.”

“I was afraid of storms for years after that,” she confessed. “It was Mr. Barrow, Thomas’s father, who taught all of us children to count the seconds between the thunder and the lightening to tell how far off the storm was. I got to like them after that.”

“Was Uncle Thomas afraid of storms, then?” Lindsey asked.

Phyllis tried to remember. She could clearly pull up the memory of sitting on the Barrows’ porch, watching the far off storm as the clock maker explained things to her, but she couldn’t remember either of the Barrow children in the scene, even though she knew they’d been there. She remembered Peggy had been afraid of the thunder, but she and Thomas had usually ignored each other back then. It had taken another year or two before he took an interest in the girls, and then it was frequently to chase them with snakes. “I’m not sure, actually. I never asked. He might have been, he was quite young at the time.”

The boy turned that new information over in his head and Phyllis was afraid she might have some explaining to do to Downton’s butler when next she saw him.

“Now your turn,” Joseph encouraged.

Lindsey still hesitated, but finally gave in. With a shrug of his shoulders he looked back down at the comforter and said, “I was back at Cousin Bertha’s. We were outside playing, us kids, or at least the boys and I. But I wasn’t me.” He frowned. “That is, you know how when you’re dreaming, you don’t always see things the way you really would? Sort of like you’re watching yourself put on a play?” Both of the adults nodded and made affirmative noises. “Well it was like that. We were playing in front of the barn, but I was watching from behind the barn. Then this cat came slinking along the back of the barn. It wasn’t a regular cat. It was one of those wild cats from the continent that Mr. Barns was telling us about in class the other day.”

“A lynx?” Joseph asked. Phyllis had missed any conversation about cats, but apparently her husband had talked to either Lindsey or Mr. Barns about the lesson.

Lindsey nodded. “Right. A lynx. Anyway, I don’t know how, but I knew it meant to kill us all. Then one of the barn cats came around the corner of the barn the other way. She was a big, spotted cat, all orange and brown and white. One of my favorites when I lived there, you know? She used to sit next to me and let me pet her some times. Anyway, she came around the corner and saw this lynx and I knew, the way you do in dreams, that she was going to fight to protect us and that the lynx was going to kill her.” He was silent a moment, then muttered, “As I said, it was silly. Lynxes don’t live here, and she was just a cat.”

“That doesn’t sound silly at all,” Joseph disagreed. “That sounds horrible. Far worse than mine, and every bit as bad as Phyllis’s, if you think about it.”

Phyllis slid forward and wrapped an arm around Lindsey’s shoulder, trying to ignore the way the boy jumped a little at the touch. “And if you liked that cat, then of course you’d be upset that she was going to die,” she added, pulling the boy against her. “I’m sure I’d lie awake for a bit, after a dream like that.”

“I’d rather not try to go back to sleep right away,” Lindsey confessed.

“I’ll tell you what, why don’t we go down stairs and make some warm milk?” Phyllis suggested. “I’m sure all of us could use the help getting back to sleep, after all of this talk of scary dreams.” It had the added advantage of allowing her to stop past the bathroom.

“I think we still have some honey too,” Joseph suggested helpfully. He then stopped and thought about it. “That sounds good even without the bad dreams, now that I think about it.” 

With both of the adults looking at him, Lindsey nodded, although it might have just been that he thought it was expected of him. They would have to work on that, Phyllis thought, but not now. Now she simply smiled and stood up, fetching the boy’s slippers and robe. Sleep came first, healing life’s cares could wait for the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> All of these are based off of dreams I remember having when I was small.


End file.
